Antenna

Antenna is a local-first feed reader designed to route new content from RSS, Atom, or JSON feeds directly to email or AI agents using the MCP protocol. It addresses the limitations of cloud-based feed readers by storing all subscriptions locally in a SQLite database, ensuring that users retain full control over their subscription data without vendor lock-in or proprietary restrictions. The tool is aimed at both individual users and developers seeking privacy, agent integration, and direct access to their reading data.

The platform supports two primary output modes: email and MCP. For email, Antenna delivers either per-post or digest HTML messages via a user's own SMTP provider, supporting services such as Amazon SES, Postmark, or Gmail app passwords. Users can toggle between per-post and digest delivery modes, and a rule engine allows for inclusion, exclusion, or alert-based filtering of posts. Deduplication is managed using stable entry IDs from feeds, and the system uses conditional GET requests (with ETag and Last-Modified) to avoid re-sending unchanged content. Additional features include rewriting relative URLs to absolute links, recovering YouTube shortcodes as email-safe thumbnails, and a dry-run mode for previewing emails before sending.

For integration with AI agents, Antenna implements the MCP protocol over standard input/output, exposing tools such as listing sources, subscribing to feeds, searching posts with FTS5-highlighted snippets, retrieving full post content, and managing recent posts or unsubscriptions. This enables agents to query, search, cluster, or summarize feed data directly from the same SQLite index used for email delivery. 12+ and is compatible with macOS and Linux platforms. Installation is local, requiring no daemon or service account, and scheduling of feed polling can be managed via launchd or cron. Users can import existing feed subscriptions using OPML files exported from other readers.

Antenna is released under the MIT license and is available as open-source software on GitHub. Its current phase supports single-user, local operation with no authentication or web UI, while future updates are planned for hosted, multi-user functionality and additional output adapters.